


The Angel in Hell

by Windcage



Series: Ascending [2]
Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms, Phantom of the Opera (2004), Phantom of the Opera - Lloyd Webber
Genre: F/M, Rating May Change, Slow Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:02:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27456178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Windcage/pseuds/Windcage
Summary: Having always wished to sing but never able to reach for that dream, Meg follows the mob heading under the Opera House set on finding Christine's tutor.
Relationships: Erik | Phantom of the Opera/Meg Giry
Series: Ascending [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2087778
Comments: 15
Kudos: 17





	1. Prologue

# Prologue

The wind was howling passed the round window to the back of the room, the broken rags of mist that were being carried by it rushing passed the shivering glass panels and the quiet rows of beds that could be glimpsed to its other side.

Laying wide awake on the bed directly under the window, the chilling air making its way inside ruffling the dark curls of her hair, Christine looked at the wood-plank ceiling and the spider webs hanging from there. The wait for sleep to reach her now ran so long that resignation had started to settle over her face, making her glance at the round window from time to time, waiting and waiting for the light of day to break over Paris, or for the first sounds of life to come to her.

As far as Christine could tell, however, the Opera remained asleep. Like it had been for what felt like hours. Silence had replaced the sound of singing choirs, the rhythmic thumping of the ballet dancers, the scratching of saws from the workshops, even the sound of pulleys and voices from the men manning the rafters far over the stage. Everyone was asleep. Everyone. Everyone except, perhaps—

Christine turned on the bed, leaned over her right arm, and looked up the small corridor to the row of rickety metal beds running parallel to the row her own bed was part off. There, covered by old multicolored blankets that more often than not left little but the top of their heads peeking from underneath, teenage girl after teenage girl laid asleep. Among the many girls downing long single braids, among the ones with unruly curls, there was only one that interested Christine right now, and that was the person asleep under a cascade of golden blonde hair, the girl two or three beds away from her.

“Meg?” Christine called, a hopeful gleam reaching her eyes when her friend seemed to move and Christine immediately pulled her legs from under the blanket, getting to her feet. _“Meg!”_

Her whispered call seemed to ring too loud in the silence, it drowned the peaceful breathing of everyone around her, it made a whimpering voice rise from somewhere—not that the words were something Christine could understand. It didn't, however, rise Meg. With her back to the small corridor, her friend didn’t move, she remained asleep. And near her own bed, already on her feet, the match she had just stroke being put near the candle's wick, Christine hesitated on walking up to her and shaking her friend awake, or simply sit back down, take the Bible that rested on the window sill and wait until morning, until Madame Giry entered the dormitory to wake them up.

"Meg?" Christine called once more.

A soft breeze made the flame on the candle she carried tremble. Sitting back on her bed, crestfallen, Christine had just blown the candle out when the breeze moving passed her spoke, and sang, and called her name.

“ _Christine…”_

Christine's eyebrows rose in an ark, a smile bloomed on her pale face. For the first time since she had woken — or perhaps since Meg had fallen asleep — the sadness haunting the dark brown eyes was pushed aside, she looked around, her attention moving away from the beds and towards the wooden ceiling and brick walls. Then, hearing the same ethereal voice call to her again, she got back up, grabbed the shoes that were under the bed and tiptoed down the corridor, moving passed the beds and sleeping teenagers, until she reached the heavy door of the dormitory and opened it.

Left on its own as Christine went down the stairs outside, the door creaked, the pained groan of rusty hinges making its way down the dormitory. Unnoticed and unheard, it moved over the many beds until it reached the same girl Christine had been trying to rise and she stirred, shivered, and hearing the door click as it closed, sat up, eyes moving almost like a magnet to the empty bed belonging to her friend.

The wool blanket, this heavy piece of fabric that didn’t offer her much of any warmth at all, slipped from Meg's shoulders, falling around her. Blinking, a new glance around the dormitory making it obvious her friend was nowhere to be found, Meg slipped out of the bed and, following the footsteps of her friend, picked the pair of shoes under her bed, tiptoed passed the rows of beds and made her way outside, towards the wooden stairs where she stopped, leaning over the handrail to take a peek through beams and drying laundry to the floors below.

“Christine?”

A shadow seemed to go by on the ground floor. Pulling herself away from the handrail, Meg went back inside the dormitory, back to dive under her bed and pull a music score from there. Then, silent footsteps leading her downstairs, she walked passed the many clotheslines, the sheets whipping in the breeze and made her way down to the long work area leading to the stage.

Rather than going there, Meg turned left halfway down, entering a small empty corridor, and moved towards the stairway at the end, one that had a small cross over it, the one that led to the Opera's chapel, the place where she knew her friend would be.

And indeed, stopping on the first steps, Meg could hear her voice rising up the spiral stairway. Christine didn’t seem to be praying, however, her voice instead in a whisper that stopped from time to time. From where Meg stood on top of the stairs, it sounded almost as if she was talking to someone, but there wasn’t any other voice coming up the whirling stairway, not one that Meg could hear no matter how much she tried. No, there was no one there with Christine that was for sure, and if she wasn't praying either, then—

Meg smiled. Music score pressed to her chest, she stepped forward, feet hitting the steps, fingers closing over the metal handrail running around the outer wall, her friend’s name already on her lips. If only Christine hadn’t started to speak again, if only Meg could miss the smile in her words, the joy that made her voice just a little bit louder, just a little bit bolder.

Meg’s hand slid back up the handrail. In a second, she was standing on the corridor again, staring down the stairs and hesitating. Then, she was making her way back to the galleries and walking passed the masks and costumes for the Opera’s latest production.

It wasn’t until she was at the stage that Meg stopped. Nose already buried in the music sheets, she made her way across the stage, her voice going over that same warming-up-scale, she heard Carlota use every day. One she could swear she had once heard coming from the very heart of the Opera, but she might have dreamed that. Then, she looked up, took a shaky breath, and started to sing.

The stage around her was empty. The seats across it were empty. There was no one there to give her pitiful looks when her voice failed and faltered and broke. There was no one there to tell her how she could improve either.

Looking up at the dark boxes and the voluptuous golden statues around her, then at the corridor leading backstage and to the chapel, Meg waited for a moment for Christine to appear, then another, and another, and dropped her head. It took a moment, for determination to settle in again, for her footsteps to lead her towards the end of the stage, where she sat, legs hanging over the orchestra pit, where she went over the music sheets once more.

This had been easier when Christine was here. When it was the two of them singing. When her friend frowned and bit her lip and they ended putting their heads together to work things out. It had been fun too—It had been fun. Meg missed her, more than anything. But sat on the stage, facing the empty audience seats and the boxes overhead, Meg was determined. She would keep trying even if she was alone. She wouldn’t give up. For maybe if she worked hard enough someone would take notice, maybe she could find someone willing to teach her and one day she would stand here, in this very stage, in front of a public and she would be seen.

Until then, Meg had the empty Opera House and no one to listen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, here is the prologue to the story, hope you liked it :)
> 
> Second chapter is in the works.
> 
> ~Windcage


	2. The Grotto

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before we start a thank to **Jojo1112** , who I forgot to mention last chapter, and who is going around typo-hunting these chapters and also to **ofserien** , **sailormoan** and **starfish8727** for their comments.
> 
> A warm welcome to all other readers :) 
> 
> And now, the chapter.

# The Grotto

The dormitory was buzzing with activity, laughter and conversations ringing as ballerina after ballerina stepped through the door and gathered near the rows of beds, the many candles and the odd petrol lamp they lit drowning the cold space under the Opera’s leaned roof in a warm yellow light.

Having lit a half-burned candle and put it on the shelf over her bed, Meg, however, was among the few who remained silent. There was some giggling coming from the trio sat on the beds behind her. Sophia and Giselle stood dressed only in their undergarments, their ongoing discussion about the new managers making them look just like huntresses. To the back, standing on the dark landing just outside the dormitory door, Sorelli was trying to call her attention. But none of that was enough to bring Meg back from her thoughts. Eyebrows pinched while she slipped off her ballet shoes and pulled the nightgown over her head, she kept thinking about the muffled conversations that had gone around the dormitory the day before. The ones centered around Christine’s empty bed. Only, rather than wondering about the Vicomte and if her friend truly had been with him, Meg thought of a sliding mirror back in the main dressing room. She thought about the strange corridor hidden behind it. She wondered about a locked door and her friend's disappearance. She wondered above all about the angel Christine said talked to her. She wondered and wondered. But she had yet to say a word.

Because her mother wouldn't like it if she were to ask.

Because her finding that passage behind the mirror seemed to mean she knew too much already.

Because she had been forbidden to ask Christine about anything.

Her fingers busying themselves with tying the straps on the chest of her nightgown, Meg glanced down the dormitory. Christine was two beds down the corridor and Meg just had to stretch her neck and lean a bit backwards to see passed the young women walking down the corridor to where Christine stood. She was already downing her white, laced nightdress, but rather than kneel in front of her bed with her bible like she had done every night since she arrived, hands joined for a prayer, Christine just stood there, staring into the round window over her bed, divided, it seemed, between combing her dark curls with trembling fingers and biting her nails.

She looked lost.

Surrounded by people, with Sorelli having given up on Meg and trying to get her attention instead, with a ballerina or another strolling right passed her, Christine looked utterly alone.

And as much as Meg would rather not get in trouble with her mother, as much as she knew it would be better to just obey, this was _Christine_ and she was her friend.

And so Meg zigzagged through the many groups. She moved passed Sophia and Giselle, she squeezed herself behind Amelie. The long chemise she was wearing flapping around her legs, she jogged the last few steps to get to Christine and, under her wide-eyed gaze, grabbed her hand and jumped to land kneeling on her bed. It was when the two of them were lying on their sides, facing each other, the cover pulled well over their heads and still surrounded by the loud conversations, that Meg finally spoke.

“Where were you?” she asked in a whisper and Christine immediately went back to bit her thumb nail. “What happened?”

**~o~o~o~**

**8 months later**

**The day of the Opera's fire** ****

**~o~o~o~**

A red curtain fell to the rough stone floor, the same pair of hands that had pulled it down going to press against the broken mirror it had hidden, trying to make it slide, trying to force it open, trying to make it move.

Frustration making her pinch her lips when the mirror didn’t give an inch, Meg took a step back and looked left, then right, her attention sliding all the way from the flight of stairs leading to an organ to the work desk and chair beyond the pier that stood to the opposite side. 

This made no sense, she kept telling herself. It made no sense at all.

She had known what she had feared she would find under the Opera House. She had known also what she had desperately hoped she would find, but this, _this_ silence, this utter _emptiness_ , wasn't any of those things. Raoul and Christine—they should have been here. The man, the phantom, her friend’s ‘Angel’, he should have been here too. Instead—

Meg strode down the path to the pier, she went right passed a group that was coming from the same work desk she was making her way to and stopped. Her right hand closed over the work desk as she kept looking at the line of shattered mirrors, at the stairs sculpted in the rock, at the distant landing to the opposite side of the grotto, her nose being mercilessly attacked by the acrid stench that was slowly overpowering the smell of smoke and melting candle wax. That smell in itself would be worrying enough without her having seen the chandelier crash, without having glimpsed the flames pursuing the fleeing crowds as she ran after Raoul and her mother, without her being down here in this cave to find everyone she had been looking for gone.

And it couldn't be. It simply couldn't.

“Think,” Meg said while facing herself in the small round mirror that was over the empty work desk. Her face was painted in shadows and a darkening orange hue by the pressing darkness. “Think, Meg.”

What had Christine told her all those months ago? She described what was definitely this place. The lake beating the edges of an underground cavern. The pier stretching through the water. The rock formations joining to shape curtains and columns. The room up the small flight of stairs with its swam-shaped bed. The place Christine had described to her was definitely this cave and everything, absolutely everything, was here, everything but—

Meg stepped back from the work desk, going back to stand in front of the line of mirrors, looking at the lake, eyebrows pinched—and then with her eyes bulging.

She honestly had not cared to look at the lake since she had forced her way through the greenish, cold water. She had never even spared a thought to the group she had followed down here and what it was up to either. Not until now. And what she was seeing—

_No—_

_Oh no._

Meg had known she had been stepping on music sheets ever since she came out of the bedroom on top of the stairs. She knew there had been rich red drapes over the broken mirrors and covering the alcoves sculpted in the rock when she arrived, she had this feeling she had seen music instruments laying around here too. But it was just now, turning right on time to see one of the large iron chandeliers standing in the lake being swarmed and pulled back and forth by a group of stagehands that the reason why every single one of those things were missing hit her.

The grotto where she stood, this place that had so obviously served as someone's home, looked well cared for when she arrived. There had been music scores on the work desk to the left of the pier, a miniature of the Opera’s stage, these figurines that looked like Christine and Carlota and everyone else. There had been drawings hanging from the walls and a marble bust with a mask and what looked like a bride’s veil laying on the floor. There had been a sort of organized chaos to the drawings and music sheets on the walls, now— _ **now,**_ there was just _chaos_. She could swear even parts of the rock had been toppled down, that even the _candles_ had gone missing. And as she noticed all of that, in the lake, the same chandelier that called her attention to the pillaging, was still being pulled back and forth, it was being forced down by greedy hands, whatever was holding it in place right in the middle of the lake breaking with a loud mechanic snap that made Meg jump. In just a moment, the candles hissed, their tenuous light snuffed out when the large chandelier fell and hit the water, disappearing under the greenish surface of the lake.

The shadows grew even darker now, pressing into every nook and crevice in the rock in such a way it was becoming hard to see. Look at this how she might, Meg knew one thing. She hadn't much time. And with that she looked passed the many groups ransacking the place once again, a sicking feeling making her search the lake and the stairs and the line of mirrors with their shattered faces, that same order to herself again in her voice.

_“Think.”_

She hadn't stepped into this place blind. She hadn't been stumbling around this cave like an idiot, but unless she could recall what Christine told her, she might as well be. And Christine, she had spoken of that passage behind the mirror, of being lead down through the tunnels under the Opera by a man in a mask, of how they had reached the canals and—

Meg turned back to the lake, she looked back at the lake and at the small waves the groups walking through it sent crashing against the cave, the same small waves that had by now soaked the floor. She searched and searched and, in her relief, she practically stumbled.

The black boat Christine had spoken of, the boat that she had ridden here, that boat was missing. And looking at the canal opposite the one she took to arrive at this cave, the one no one had dared to search for it was far too deep, Meg hoped, she truly hoped, that was why Christine and Raoul weren't here. That that was how they disappeared. Because even though she didn't believe the man who called himself the Opera Ghost would care to hide it if he had done something to them — he certainly hadn't cared with Buquet — she would rather believe he wasn't hiding anything right now. She would rather because she had come in here searching for him too.

Meg’s shoulders went straight again. In just a moment, she had looked away from the canals and pressed her lips and squinted to see through the mounting shadows, to look at the work desk to her left, at the organ to her right, at the line of broken mirrors and the stairs leading to the bedroom. She looked back even at the group that destroyed the chandelier, a group that was now pulling it from the water and carrying it under the raised grates, right under the water still dripping from the algae stuck to it, and away up the same path that led back to the Opera.

He had to be here, she told herself. _He had to._

Raoul and Christine had escaped back to the surface, surely, but not he. He had to be here still. And so, there was only a conclusion to be made. _Only one she was willing to make._

She had to be missing something.

There was some other way out of here other than the water and the boat. There had to be. And wherever that passage was, that was where she needed to get herself to. _Now._ So—

"Where did you go?" Meg whispered, nails sinking into a white half-mask she had all but forgotten was in her hand. "Where—?"

Meg strode to the small stairs to her left. Going up the steps and by the organ, the tip of her boots scratching on the rock, she jogged to the entrance of the bedroom, put her hand over the rock by the entrance, and stopped just as the swam-bed came into view. There was a chorus of angry voices coming from somewhere. The cries sounded muffled and echoed on the arched ceiling overhead, but even not knowing where they came from Meg could tell there was something different to them. Some sort of victorious savagery that—

Her heart sank right to the floor. Hand still closed over the rock, Meg looked away from the swam bed and the toppled music box with the monkey. Hair cascading over her shoulder, she did so in time to see the head of a group step from within a passage right to the end of the row of mirrors, a passage she somehow failed to notice. One by one, men were striding out and the worse of it, the very worse stood right in the middle of the group. It was right now being forced to go out of the passage and down to the pier.

A man.

A tall, pale man, she recognized not so much by the clothes he still downed, but for his face. For even though she had only glimpsed it through the wood structure built for the opera, _his_ opera, there was no way this wasn’t him. And just as that comprehension hit her, the mob tossed him to the ground. Head hitting the side of the pier, he lay on the rock unmoving, uncaring even as the group fell on him and Meg felt her throat close.

She hadn't been wrong. He was here! He truly was here. And now, she wished he wasn’t.

She would rather she never had found him than this.

And she had to do something.

 _She_ _had to!_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we go :) Next chapter once more is being worked on and this time we go to Erik.
> 
> I hope you all liked it. See you around!


	3. The Cage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to **Jojo1112** for beta-ing this one!
> 
> A warm welcome to **argelfraster_z** :) Thank you so much for your comment.
> 
> Hello, everyone! Let's get into the new chapter!

# The Cage

The cylinder inside the music box was spinning, the joyous clicking of its music singing over the crowd's excited gasps as the individual teeth of the metal comb were stroke by the pins and the lever kept turning.

Artistically twisted over what had once been a colorful rug, her legs making an elegant ark as they rose towards the night sky and her back curved allowing them to touch her head, the fair’s contortionist looked away from the group of girls in white dresses that had stopped in the path to stare at her and the people walking behind them. A glance was all it took to tell her the music box on the stand right in front of her was about to stop playing and for her to reach up with her legs again. Her body now making an almost perfect 'C' she stretched one of her feet forward, reaching out until her fingers found the handle and started to wind it.

The music picked up speed, going to again sing happily and loudly over the girls in front of the contortionist and the people going around the paths, looking at the performers and tents and the 'oddities' so many of the signs announced. Had any of them paid attention when the music box had gotten quieter, they might have noticed another sound _—_ a crisp sound, a musical sound _—_ was making its way over the discolored, old tents set along the path, over the wagons behind those and the horses locked on their enclosures. And had anyone tried to follow it, the sound would lead them inside a tent to the back of the fair, to a young boy sat on a cage, playing with a toy monkey and a pair of small cymbals.

There was beauty in the sound he created, no matter if he didn't manage to mimic the joy of the music playing outside, and in the midst of the straw and the filth surrounding him, the sound of cymbals was the only beautiful thing he had access to. At least, until with an annoyed grunt, a baton smashing against the bars and a shout even that was cut out.

_“ **Quiet!”**_

The boy in the cage shivered, his terror such the monkey he had been holding fell to the pile of fetid straw he sat on, that the small cymbals he was playing with rolled away from him, stopping only when they hit a half chowed up bone someone had tossed into the cage, disturbing the mass of flies gathered around it.

Looking back at the man who had just shouted at him to find him making his way around the tent and down towards the place where it opened into the fair outside, the boy picked up the monkey, the sounds of laughter and voices and footsteps making their way inside leaving him to stare into the monkey's beady eyes.

He knew what came next. What everyone was here to see, and that should have been enough for him to stay with the monkey and the cymbals. It should have. But stealing a look back at the crowd pressed against the bars, at the men and women and children, his eyes found a way of stumbling into a pair of blue ones. A teenage girl, a girl many many years older than him was looking straight at him. Hands closed around the bars, her head leaning against them in pity, she got his attention for a moment, before he looked down again.

His fingers wrapped around the monkey’s arms once more, they made them move as if the doll was the one playing the cymbals. This time the sound whispered under the tumult of voices and the much more menacing sound of heavy boots. He knew what was coming and still the kick and the beating caught him off guard, as did the nails biting painfully into his scalp, twisting his head until he was looking directly at the crowd. Around him, faces, dozens, laughed and laughed and left, they left as he crawled over the straw to get back behind the sack, they left as the girl from before stayed behind, the first who ever did, the only one who hadn't screamed or laughed or flinched at the Devil’s Child.

And behind the crude cuttings on the fabric, the ones that allowed him to see a slip of the word, the boy watched, one hand reaching towards the back of the girl once she too stepped away, a nameless despair calling him back to his handler.

The man stood inside the cage with his back turned to him. He was distracted, counting money just like that first day, when he had shoved him inside this cage. Attention slipping back to the rope, the boy slithered to the bars, he took the knot apart. Hands wrapped on the extremities of the rope, he crept behind the handler, closer and closer, until he was so close he could smell the stench of the man. And then, with a struggle and a snarl and more strength than he thought he possessed it was _over_ and he was running down the streets of some city, following the golden haired girl with a new fear in his heart.

That he might lose her.

That she might leave him behind, alone among the high buildings flanking the streets and the murderous voices following them. And she easily could have. She was fast, much faster than him, but rather than just run, rather than just look after herself, Antoinette—he had barely understood her words, but that was her name—kept looking back. Over and over again. Until she grabbed his wrist and they both sprinted down this great plaza, feet flying over the large stone slabs that made the floor, to reach the building on the other side and open a grid on the floor.

In just some hours, peeking from an empty audience box into a colorful stage, captured and enchanted and so distracted by a woman singing, he ended up having to hide behind a curtain from a janitor with a broom, the boy would know he had made his way to some place called Opera Populaire, in some city named Paris he had never heard about before. He would also be made to sneeze by the dust on that same curtain and send the woman cleaning between the chairs fleeing into the ground floor screaming over ghosts in Box 5.

That would be an accident. That first time at least it would be, but, that he had to hide down in the chapel once more, that Antoinette had looked up from the stage white with fear, that she was so afraid for him, should have made it clear to him even back then that what his beloved Opera House was.

_A cage._

It had always been a cage. He choose to lock himself in it, he held the key and made it _his_ , _his_ Opera House! But he couldn’t ever be a part of it. Antoinette knew it. He knew it. They never pretended otherwise.

So why, _**why**_ did he start to believe that could change?! That he could be more than a falling curtain, a second-long apparition on the rafters, a whisper that sent a shiver up a spine?! Why did he dare to believe he could be real?!

The answer was in a shy smile and a crown of curly dark hair.

The answer was in the sound of quiet footsteps coming down a spiral stairway.

The answer was a child, then girl, then woman.

The answer was an angel, his angel, Christine.

And one day, knowing her would hurt so much he would rather he had never met her.

**~o~o~o~**

****2**** ** **7** ** ****years** ** ****later** **

****The day Christine left** **

**~o~o~o~**

Loud voices echoed down a dark passage, broken words and angry cries going down the humid walls.

Stumbling when a pair of hands shoved him through the mirror’s frame at the end of the passage, the man who had once been called the Devil's Child, stared blindly at the rough floor. The sound and the feeling of the mirror fragments snapping under his boots barely reaching his mind, he was forced down a path he had walked a million times before, down to a pier where he had sat for hours focusing on his music, on his drawings, down to a place that had meant he was safe _—_ until now.

Something _—_ a foot, a baton _—_ came crashing against the back of his knees. Immediately, his legs buckled. He fell to the floor, his head hitting the side of the pier sending the world rolling and crashing, before pain exploded from his side and curled over himself.

He had known this pain before.

He had known all of this before.

It was what made him press his lips so no sound would escape him. It was what made him try to reach out for his neck the instant he glimpsed a rope in the midst of his assailants, forgetting for a moment he had his hands tied, that he could do nothing to defend himself when it was put right over his head. Forgetting even that he had no wish to defend himself, that he had no reason left to do so. Forgetting—until a veil came floating right passed the pier and what little defiance he had managed to conjure immediately deserted him.

 _Christine_ , he might have whispered to the pale piece of fabric, but the name never left his lips, the rope around his neck made sure of it just as a new kick was aimed at his side and he found himself no longer caring. Not for the pain exploding in his ribs with each new blow. Not for the taste of blood in his mouth. Not that he could hardly breathe. Not that the group around him seemed to be growing and growing, the forest of legs now so thick he couldn't see to this place that was once his sanctuary or to the young woman sprinting to the levers at the end of the pier and whatever that might mean.

 _Christine—_ _Christine was gone._

A hand reached through the commotion to grab him by the hair. It pulled on it until he was on his knees and then twisted, turning his face to the wall of people around him, to the shouts and cursing that drowned the sound of the dropping grates to his back and the diving of the lonely chandelier that remained in the middle of the lake, that hid even the dash of the same young woman from before as she run up the stairs to the organ, and stopped right in front of the last remaining candles.

A gigantic splash echoed in the cave right at that moment, and just like that the hand that had been pulling his hair disappeared. So did _everything_ else. A wall of darkness crashed into him as he hit the floor. Chaos exploded all around. As one, with a lonely, dying torch among it, the crowd went into a frenzy of shouts and screams, of curses and swearing that became louder still when with a bump and panicked cry someone fell into the water and the entire group, blind as it was, seemed to step away from him to try to help.

It was his chance, some part of his mind understood. A chance to save himself. And yet, water running passed the pier where he laid, locks of brown hair bobbing in the surface of the lake, strangled gulps of air getting passed his lips, he did not move. He remained where he was, laying amid the darkness and the orange hue of the torch, he laid there even as a shadow dropped to its knees at his side and grabbed the rope around his neck, releasing it, pulling it straight off.

“Come,” it spoke and the feminine quality to that voice, the gentleness to it shocked him so much he looked up, towards this shadow crowned in light, towards a pair of pale blue eyes, towards _—_

_Antoinette?_

“Quick, before they notice,” she urged.

A warm hand closed over his wrist, caring not to untie the ropes around them, and pulled him away from the pier and into the lake. Cold water getting higher and higher as they moved towards the not entirely closed grates, she pulled him with the kind of determination that wouldn't allow for any discussion, that was the only thing that made him move.

“ _Quick,"_ she said.

And he followed that speck of light into the reigning darkness, where no one could see him, the only place where he had ever been safe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading :) And the great news are: next chapter these two will finally be together! Time for a try at some dialogue XD (time to go and write it).
> 
> See you all around!
> 
> ~Windcage


	4. The Escape

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kudos to **Jojo1112** who read this one first!
> 
> Also to **argelfraster_z** and **Smile_something** :) Thank you so much for your comments!
> 
> And now, chapter!

# The Escape

Darkness. Once upon a time, lying on her bed, squinting over a book or another, Meg had called darkness to the delicate brushes of gray the moonlight painted the Opera’s dormitory in. It had been silly, she now understood, but then again, just moments ago, following the group of stagehands and police officers that had stormed into the cistern under the Opera House and into the tunnels feeding it, darkness was what she had called the shadows fleeing from the torches, seemingly afraid of the flickering light.

She had been wrong in both instances.

Darkness, true darkness, was not something she had known until she had stepped into the labyrinth of tunnels under Paris trying to evade a raging mob. Standing in it, was like being surrounded by an impenetrable black wall, one so oppressive, so complete, Meg had long lost track of time, of where she was, of absolutely everything except the piece of wet fabric locked in her hand, the only thing telling her she hadn’t lost track of the man she had just saved.

The Opera's ghost, O.G. as he signed his notes as, walked right in front of her, the sound of his footsteps so silent Meg kept pressing her fingers against his back just to be sure he was there. She absolutely no idea how he knew where they were or even _if_ he knew where they were going, but she wouldn’t let go of him no matter what. She refused to. She doubted if she lost him, she would ever find a way out. And so, her fingers kept firmly closed over the back of his shirt, they remained there even as small traces of yellow light started to appear through a line of vents to her left and Meg finally managed to convince herself that contrary to all those times she had thought she saw light behind them, this time it was actually real. It had to be real if, looking to the side, she could glimpse of the wheels of coaches and shoes and tree trunks through those same vents.

"Where—?"

The query was broken by her almost running into the man in front of her. Leaning to the right to try and see passed him, only to find she could see nothing except for the same damp rock that had distorted and multiplied her voice just now, Meg got on her tiptoes, trying to search the path ahead from over her companion's shoulder. She might as well have done nothing, however, he was tall enough that not even getting _en pointe_ would be of much help here.

“Where are we?” Meg therefore whispered, the hand she still kept around the white shirt he was wearing calling her attention to the way his back had just tensed and almost immediately to the reason for it: she had addressed him over his right shoulder, a glance to the side and—

Meg was back to having her feet fully on the ground, the glimpse of angry red skin she had just had sending her attention straight to the path where she stood.

"Sorry," she said, and again she leaned to the side, trying to look ahead. "Why did we stop?"

The answer came in the form of a trapdoor overhead, of the long stairway on the other side, a stairway that went up and up and _up_ still until they were clearly no longer in the catacombs but high over the streets. The answer came in the form of a wall panel on top of that same stairway. What was on the other side once Meg stepped through the threshold looked like some kind of small storage place, perhaps it would be more accurate if she called it a pantry. There were shelves and boxes all packed in rows and the smell to match. In fact, closing the wall panel behind her, Meg could feel the strong smell of onions bite at her nostrils, the unmistakable sent of salted fish and cheese. What mattered to her most right now, however, was to get something, _anything_ , to light up the space. With her luck though, she had to peek inside several boxes with potatoes, cheese, and garlic, before she ended up rolling her eyes at herself. At her side, on top of this barrel that was right beside the sliding wall panel was not only what she had been looking for— _a candle_ —but a candle on a candle holder and matches.

Well, things were at least looking up. Or, at least, that was what Meg thought, until she turned to find herself looking down a shelf flanked aisle, completely _alone_.

“Monsieur?” Meg immediately called out, row after row of the wooden boxes on the shelves falling under her scrutiny as she looked left, then right, and what might be footsteps coming from the street — what some part of her mind had just insisted came from the hidden stairway leading to the catacombs — made her step away from the wall.

The pantry was truly small. It was even smaller than she had thought just a moment ago, small enough, in fact, that he couldn’t possibly have gone very far. Or so Meg hoped. Reminding herself at this time of _why_ most of the Opera had been convinced they were dealing with some kind of supernatural specter rather than someone of flesh and bone was probably not the best way to soothe her nerves.

 _“Monsieur?”_ Meg insisted, risking a step towards the place where the aisle opened.

There was no answer despite that, no sound except for the whining of the wood planks under her feet. With no real choice other than keep moving down the narrow aisle in front of her, Meg let her fingers slide down the shelf at her side, and walked down to the place where the shelves to her right gave away to empty space. Once there, she peeked to the empty space beyond the shelves.

She almost sighed with relief.

Not a meter to her left, standing with his back turned in front of the wall opposite the shelves, stood the person she was looking for. What he was doing, though, taking this line of braided onions from the large nail on the wall and putting it on the floor, made little to no sense to her until he raised his arms and put the rope tying his hands on that very same nail.

Meg grimaced in sympathy when he pulled the ropes back and forth on the nail and a pained hiss cross his lips. It was—Well, of course, it _would_ work, but—

“Can I help?”

There must have been something to her voice just now, something that wasn’t as he expected for his back went tense, torso immediately turning not to the right where she stood, but to the left. It was a completely unnatural movement. One that forced him to actually take a step to be able to face her over his shoulder and that seemed to be entirely directed at hiding his face. That certainly was meant for that for he stood there, snarling and not moving, only half of his face in view and Meg could but be grateful for that. It meant he wouldn’t lunge. He certainly seemed capable of it. He seemed to want to do it. The only good thing here was that his expression was so transparent that, if he did, Meg at least would know the reason why.

She wasn’t who he had been expecting.

She wasn’t who he had thought she was.

She wasn’t—

The snarl to his lips wavered, it dissolved, and just like that a shadow of what looked like recognition went through his eyes, it slipped right into his words.

“You—” he whispered, voice rough, so much so he sounded nothing like the tenor who had made her sprint back to the stage for the last act of Don Juan, but like someone who had been sick—or crying. “I know you.”

Meg joined her hands and, flanked by shelves and boxes of assorted vegetables on both sides, waited to be called Christine’s friend or Madame Giry’s daughter, to be defined by someone else, just like she always was. She waited. But what she was offered was a simple whisper, so quiet it hardly carried.

“You used to make _her_ laugh.”

And just like that it was gone. The ferocity from just a moment ago. The dangerous gleam to his eyes. It all left him and in doing so it seemed to drain him so completely he was left staring at the wall, no longer caring to break the rope keeping his hands together, seemingly no longer caring for anything at all for he sat, back to the wall, face hidden behind one of his still tied hands.

As for Meg, she gazed at him, curled as he was, for a moment longer and reached inside her shirt, gazing at the half-mask she had brought from the grotto for the moment it took to convince herself to step forth and drop to her knees in the wood-plank floor.

“You have the advantage on me, monsieur,” she noted, putting the white mask in the space between her knees and his feet, and not for the first time thinking how odd it was that Christine had told her so much that she knew about his lair, that she knew about his _temper_ , but—

“I don’t know your name.”

It took a moment to get a reaction, for her to be facing not the top of her companion's head and this mass of damp unruly hair, but the pair of eyes looking up from behind the hand covering his face. It was a strange gaze, an empty gaze, and the meaning of her words, it seemed to take forever to reach him.

“My name?” he finally whispered.

Meg stroke the match she had taken from the barrel near the wall panel, left hand forming a shell behind the candle as she took the small flame to the wick and a warm if tenuous yellow circle surrounded them both. Only then, did she look back up to find the reason for the ongoing silence, the reason why her friend had never told her the name of her Angel, etched on the way a deep crevice was forming between that same angel's eyebrows.

“My name,” he repeated.

Meg’s eyes narrowed, her attention going from him to the match still burning between her fingers when this growing feeling of heat started biting at her skin.

“I just assumed you knew mine,” she stated, waving away the discomfort that had settled on the small pantry with the same ease she waved the match to extinguish it and smiled when the pair of what she could now see were grayish-green orbs looked up at her. “Bold of me, I know.”

Again, silence surrounded them. Again, that faraway look took hold of the man sitting across from her. Cold sending a shiver up her spine, Meg rubbed her hands against the drenched trousers she was wearing. Her gaze, in the meanwhile, returned to the ropes around his wrists.

“Can I help with that?”

Her right hand was stretched in front of her now, a quick glance to the ropes the only thing needed for him to understand what was she on about and to visibly hesitate, the look he went to give to her hand so wintry it was surprising it didn’t turn black and fall straight off. More surprising than that, however, was that the moment that glare failed to make her flinch or flee or whatever the intention was, he turned his head so that its right side was facing the wall, and lowered his arms, allowing Meg to inspect the ropes.

A glimpse was all it took for her to wrinkle her nose. The ropes were tight, _far too tight,_ so much so they seemed to be biting deep into his skin.

“I apologize if I hurt you,” she spoke, twisting her hair and pulling it over her shoulder.

The warning, she would think in just a moment, had been fair. In fact, she just had to touch the knot, to try to take it apart, to catch a glimpse of clenched teeth. And yet, oddly enough through that pained expression, was the first time he ever addressed her.

“You’re far from home, Marguerite,” she heard the same raspy voice from before whisper. “Far from light. All flowers fade in the night.”

Meg’s eyebrows arched, then pinched, this weird tickling on the back of her mind, this musical _something_ to the words, sending her attention straight back to him.

“Is—?”

Meg stopped, the small flame on the candle lighting her expression and a brow about as wrinkled as his had been a moment ago.

"Was that a song?" she finally queried.

“Was it?” came the answer, and just like that he shook his head leaving Meg to bit her lip, leaving her attention to go back to the ropes. 

“No one calls me Marguerite,” she told him, fingers working around the knot. “It is just Meg.”

An exhale, something that might actually have been a sigh of resignation, crossed his lips, only to be turned into a groan by Meg's determined pull at the knot.

“Yes,” he nevertheless said, the only part of him Meg could see right now, his fingers, stretching and curling with the pain. “It is a shame.”

The knot came apart at those words, the release making him pull his hands away so suddenly Meg almost fell on top of the mask and the candle, that she would surely have dived head first to the floor if this rather large hand hadn't closed over her shoulder the same instant and then retracted as if she had burned it. Surprise sending her attention back up, Meg was only on time to catch him pressing the marks on his neck.

“Where is your mother?” he rasped.

It all came back with that. The flames climbing up the curtains. The chaos backstage as stagehands and ballerinas and craftsmen tried to save tools and props. All those things she had witnessed before the building mob had gone by with its cries of "Track down this murderer, he must be found!" and made her follow suit.

If her mother had returned from guiding Raoul to the catacombs by that time Meg had gone down herself, she hadn’t seen her. If she was somewhere in the Opera she didn’t know. She hoped her mother was fine. She wondered if that was what he wished to hear, that her mother was fine, rather than Meg’s whispered “I don’t know” rather than—

“You know her.”

Because the moment she said so, that pair of pale greenish eyes went dark.

“I know Antoinette would never have you near me,” he spoke and, just like every other time he fell quiet, something seemed to pull him away from her, from the world, until he was barely in reach. Only this time, what that was had a form, it was there physically when he opened his left hand and stared into a ring. “Wise, wasn't she? She was wise—”

Meg bit her lower lip, attention going from him to the ring he held and its large sapphire. She knew it. Of course, she did. And the question that had been in the tip of her tongue the entire time, that she had not mean to ask — not right now, not, at least, until she was certain about _him —_ suddenly found a space.

“Where is Christine?”

That strangled sound rising from his throat, the one going to fill the space between the shelves and the boxes and the barrels to the back of the pantry before he bit it down, it might have been a sob, it might have been laughter. Seeing him shake his head, seeing him pull his hair back, Meg wasn't sure at all.

“Gone,” she heard him say, locks of hair returning to their place when the hand again came down. “Gone forever with her Vicomte.”

Lids falling over his eyes, he closed his fingers around the ring again, pressing the hand that held it to his lips, the ruthless finality to his next words clearly meant for himself.

“She is _gone_.”

His voice broke further, the back of his head going to rest against the wall, Adam’s Apple bobbing in his throat. It took a long moment until he finally he opened his eyes again and looked from the ceiling to the floor, to the mask Meg had put between them, and made this gesture to reach for it. Rather than take it, however, he immediately flinched, hand flying to his ribs.

Now leaning forward, taking the mask on her hands, Meg reached out with it, only letting it go when it was slipped from her fingers. Only then, with it covering his face, did he get back to his feet, going the few steps separating them from the door to their right, where he stopped, fingers over the door handle.

“You don’t belong here,” he spoke and for the first time, for the very first time, seeing him turn to face her, Meg was able to recognize the man from the Masquerade, tall and intimidating and with the authority to match.

“ _ **Leave.”**_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this one took a while to write, but all that matters is that it is here :)
> 
> I truly hope you liked it. Now, to the next one!
> 
> ~Windcage


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